Published on 9th May 2013 this will be a cracking read for the book clubs. It has everything you need to grip you, get you thinking and most importantly question the character’s judgement. the blurb on the book says:

“A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal…Acute, witty …winningly cunning”. (“Sunday Times”). The year is 1972. The Cold War is far from over. Britain is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism. Serena Frome, in her final year at Cambridge, is being groomed for MI5. Serena is sent on a secret mission – Operation Sweet Tooth – which brings her into the world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage – trust no one.

If you would like to see this one on our listings, drop us a line… let me know.

You’d think I was trying to move www.amazon.co.uk library and not my own at the size of the darn thing.. and why is it that spiders like my dusty old pages? Oh yes, I have some very old books indeed that I love to roam in on a quiet day.

You can see it now, cross legged on the floor, coffee to my right and musty old tombs all around me. I open one and a halo of dust blesses the next adventure we’re about to take.

That’s the dream when I think about moving my library. The truth is a little different! Me and my paper friends snuggle together tightly as I carry my treasured parcels from one room to another. Me barely breathing, and I swear the books feel the same. What if I carry too many and the pressure breaks an ancient leather spine? I’ve been known to weep at the sight of a beautiful spin broken and shattered in its cracked old skin. And that’s only half the story, because the library shelves aren’t ready for them and so this is only half the journey.

This is a true story of a child born into a Middle Class (albeit dysfunctional) family in Middle Class Home Counties England in the Middle of the last century who came to be anything but ‘Middling’. As the Child attempts to understand her Sado/Masochistic fantasies from the age of four she soon realises her lack of fear of punishment empowers her. Gradually she comes to terms with how to relish this ability and to control even those who she would wish to dominate her. Her journey, often involving Headline Stories and Old Bailey Trials gave her many names. The Countess, The Whore, The Sadistic Pervert, Lesbian Mother, Freedom Fighter, HumanRight’s Campaigner, Peace Tree Planter. They are all parts of a unique whole, encompassing four decades. Her story could have ended at sixteen after planning her expulsion from Grammar School and devirginising herself with her first female lover. It could have ended in a Parisian Sexual Fantasy Brothel a few months later with the sudden disappearance of a Body, it could have ended when she was raped by a client in a Notorious English Whorehouse or under a car when a Pimp tried to kill her for stealing his Girls. She survived to fight Court Cases brought by corrupt Police and Win, to see the Gangs controlling the London of the sixties imprisoned knowing and indeed living with part of their legal team. She understood intimately the need for Mafia money to control the Gambling Dens in Wilson’s London and the Honey traps used by the USA in Europe to ‘fight’ the Cold War paranoia of that decade of so called Free Love. There were few Pop Stars or Media Wheeler Dealers of that era who did not use premises in which she was involved. Many sharing a bed or a body previously occupied by a Sheik, Princeling or King. Or just some faded aristocrat with odd tastes in instruments of Torture. Come in and share this tale. See how it unexpectantly leads to love, childbirth by insemination and a Secret Cell of Resistance during the First Gulf War. How the Art of Brothel keeping helped release a kidnapped prisoner in Arafat’s compound in Gaza, but mostly be excited by the graphic details of a life with it’s own Rules.

Are you brave enough to introduce this book to your Book Club and talk about the twists and turns of a full life?

Satinpaperbacks.com brings you the opportunity to delve into this world for a fraction of the cost and all at a click of a button – be daring!

I was looking into a new book on www:amazon.co.uk that has come out called The Wall by William Sutcliffe, has anyone read it yet? It’s a fascinating tale of a young boy who’s football goes over this wall. The problem is that on the other side of that wall is a place that no one goes or never comes back from. He climbs over the boundary wall to search for it and finds a flattened house that was once “the home of people from the other side” and, beside it, the entrance to a dark tunnel. Crawling through the tunnel, he emerges into a wholly unfamiliar world.

All well and good you might say, just another fantasy story, but no this is not the case. Although Sutcliffe doesn’t tell us that the boy, Joshua, is an Israeli or that the people on the other side of the wall are Palestinian. There are no shortage of markers to locate the knowing reader topographically or historically: the barren land and olive trees, the wall itself, with new pristine settlements on one side and crowded alleyways on the other. Sutcliffe has set himself a challenge in writing this novel, which is “crossover” in two senses of the word – both YA and adult, aimed both at those who know and those who don’t. There are moments in the first half when he falls a little short of pulling off the feat of balancing a boy’s adventure tale – filled with chases and hiding places and journeys in the rat-filled dark – with the more introspective story of a young man coming to understand the world in which he lives. When Joshua returns home to Amarias for the first time, it’s hard – even for the adult reader – not to want the book to hurry up and send him back through the tunnel into the world of adventure again.

I find it fascinating that an author would take up such a tricky task of bringing a child through to a young man in a violent and unpredictable world. I admire him for his effort and applaud his achievement, is this something you would like to see soon? Leave me a post and let me know what you think..?

We have I am sure, all of us felt that once we have fallen in love that it may endure beyond all time and all ages. In this modern day of quickie divorces and civil partnerships, Rupert Brookes reminds us that the reason we come together, to be with one another; is because of our belief in the Endurance of love; Purity that it cannot be corroded and above all, Faith that when we fall in love, the choice made by our hearts wasn’t a wrong one.

Rupert’s life was full of hardship and heartbreak and here we can see the agony’s he felt before his breakdown in 1913 and early death in 1915. It is worth taking a moment to linger..

Greetings and what a great day it is for fellow book lovers everywhere!
Now finally we have cheaper books, easier to get hold of books and easier choices. It’s true, it is a little like standing in a book shop with brilliant choices to hand without having to find a way to make the time to get there. Moreover, your club may suggest a book out of your comfort zone, and quite right, that’s why we do it!

The challenge to find a great new author you will love, to be captured page by page until at the end your scrabbling to find the next book they wrote… but that doesn’t always happen and sometimes your shelves will groan under the weight of tomes you will never pick up again!

At Satin Paperbacks we eliminate the one downside to exploring the undulating adventure of discovering new authors so your shelves will only be filled with the books you love. Love Lies Bleeding is an adult book full of adult language that will ask you to address your perceptions of gender and the world that drives those perceptions. Well worth the ride to find where it will take mind. Happy reading